


the stars have all been blown out

by cerie



Category: Sanctuary (TV)
Genre: AU, F/M, First Kiss, First Time, Out of the Blue
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-06-15
Updated: 2011-06-15
Packaged: 2017-10-20 10:33:02
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,541
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/211843
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/cerie/pseuds/cerie
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>AU for Out of the Blue.  Helen/John and Helen/Will.  This is my take on the reality in Out of the Blue from Helen's perspective.</p>
            </blockquote>





	the stars have all been blown out

She’s just shy of thirty when they marry and while Helen hardly cares what society thinks, she knows that his career would take off if he had a traditional family unit waiting at home. Personally, she’d rather keep things as they are but John has ambitions and Helen doesn’t have much of anything. She’s independently wealthy, father’s money, and she’s spent much of her life floating from one good thing to the next. John’s the closest thing to normal she’s ever really had. Her father likes him well enough and her mother doesn’t have an opinion. She doesn’t have friends to speak of; artist’s hours and anxiety disorders don’t make finding friends an easy task.

It doesn’t change much at first. John decides they should move halfway across the world to Canada because he’s been offered a job in Old City and Helen’s always been mobile. It’s hard to leave her parents behind but both seem to wish her well and she’s almost excited to embark on a new adventure. It’s been a long time since Naples, where she and John first spent a holiday together, and it feels like the start of a grand adventure.

He’s busier in Old City than he ever was in London and Helen finds herself missing Oxford more and more every day. She never finished, dropped out in her third year, but John had finished with honors and high distinction. He’s a brilliant barrister, a virtual dynamo in the courtroom, and watching him is sort of like watching art in motion. Helen’s never been overly fond of doing portraits but she imagines if she ever did one of John, it’d be frenetic, kinetic and utterly unapologetic about its motion, just like the subject.

She broaches the subject of children with him one night when they’re curled in bed, snow softly falling outside their bedroom window. Her thighs still ache from when he’d spread them wide to fuck her and he’s still half hard against her hip. She pushes her sweat-soaked bangs off her forehead and props on one elbow to watch him, wonders what he’ll say. The answer she wants is that yes, he does, and they can start trying this instant. The answer she gets is a skeptical laugh and shake of his head.

“I’m focusing on my career right now, Helen. We don’t have time to raise a baby. Besides, you’d be too busy to paint if we had children and that’d make you unhappy, wouldn’t it? Let me make you happy, Helen. This isn’t what’s going to do it.”

She wants to protest but it dies in her throat when his hands are on her again and he rolls her on top of him. Even when their words seem to miss one another by wider and wider degrees, they’ve always been in concert when it came to this. Her body’s made for his, always has been, and Helen tries to sink into passion and ignore logic for the time being. She hopes her choice saves her relationship. She doesn’t know that it always will.

***

Shortly after her thirty fifth birthday, Helen realizes it’s probably not going to work. She spends most of her time sleeping and going to the therapist just enough to keep her in a prescription of Valium and John’s working all hours of the day and night. It’s perfunctory, the whole marriage, and mostly built on the fact that he needs her to look good and play wife. She’d loved him once and she had no doubt in her mind that he loved her but she doesn’t know if they’re still _in love_.

It’s made a little more apparent when a new couple moves in across the street. He’s a doctor of some sort, compensating for something with the car he drives, and she’s nothing but a cute, perky homemaker. Helen watches them through her front windows sometimes when she’s painting and tries to come up with a story as to who they are and how they fit together. She’s from Omaha, in Helen’s version, and she’s content to bake pies and watch Oprah while he goes to work at the hospital.

She waves, the wife, and Helen half-heartedly waves back. It’s hard to watch her greet her husband at the door when Helen hasn’t seen hers in weeks. It’s hard to watch her lovingly tend a rosebush when Helen’s own garden is in vast disarray because she just doesn’t care about anything anymore. She and John argue and Helen’s still caught up in the house across the street, still caught up in their happy little picture of marriage.

John brings her home a cat for Christmas, a tiny ball of fur that’s snuggled in his coat when he comes home late from work. He’s got a heavy caseload as the assistant district attorney and while Helen knows his job’s important, she hates that she spent hours trying to make Christmas dinner the way she had back in London, back before they married, and John hasn’t noticed. He kisses her absently and she coos over the kitten, christening him Henry. It’s one of the better presents John’s given her in a long, long while.

Helen wonders what the husband across the way gave his wife for Christmas. She gets her answer on Boxing Day; a shiny new convertible.

Helen starts a new set of paintings, soft landscapes. John doesn’t notice, only that she’s switched from Abstract to realism and he asks her what changed. He’s got a tumbler of scotch in one hand and he gestures with it while he tries to make some sweeping statement about the meaning in her art. Helen wrinkles her nose and keeps painting, mixing blues and greens on her palette and blending them carefully into the horizon above the treeline.

“I much preferred all the squiggly lines. This is just common, Helen.”

She doesn’t answer and keeps painting but when he leaves the room, she notices that her hand is shaking. She sits down and takes two Valium, shaking the little white pills into her palm and chasing them with the half-empty tumbler of scotch that John left behind. He’s up in his office working on a casefile, some serial killer, and Helen can’t find it in herself to care. John has a passion for his work. Helen doesn’t really have a passion for anything.

***

John doesn’t come home on New Years’. Helen drinks alone. The couple from across the street is having a party, nice and lively, and around eleven he and his wife come over. Helen’s utterly unprepared to meet them considering it’s gotten to be sort of like a television show, watching them and imagining what their lives are like. Helen’s never considered actually talking with them. She discovers that the wife is named Abby and she’s from Kansas City, not Omaha. The husband is named Will and he is a doctor, a cardiac surgeon. Helen didn’t peg him for that and she struggles to adjust her worldview.

They invite her over to ring in the New Year and Helen demurs, jerking her head back toward a half-finished painting set up in the living room. Husband and wife exchange a glance and Abby’s bright smile dims a half a watt, somewhat crushed that her friendly overture wasn’t well-received. Helen feels bad but the poor girl doesn’t want a friend like her anyway. She’d hardly be good company, irritable as she is on a regular basis.

There’s the occasional invitation from the Zimmerman household but Helen tosses them all in the bin and paints through it. She even incorporates one in a mixed media piece, something edgy and dark about how the middle class is stifling creativity and she sells it for a cool half million on auction. It’s to an anonymous buyer and Helen doesn’t care. What’s she going to do? Come visit? Hardly. Paintings are her work, not her children.

They get a dog and while they have some neighborhood boy walk it for them, it always manages to end up on Helen’s lawn. Henry jumps on the windowsill and hisses at it whenever it encroaches on her lawn and Helen feels like pelting it with rocks when it digs up her garden and does its business right near her front step. Sternly toned notes pass back and forth for a little while and then a cold war sets in. Helen imagines the Zimmermans are still cross she didn’t come over for New Years’ or Easter and Helen is frankly fairly annoyed that they keep asking.

A small part of her knows she should try to do better and she stops painting for a little while, trying to hold together the final threads of her marriage. John’s never home and while he’s not physically abusive (she’d have left long ago if he was) the absenteeism and the dismissal of everything Helen thinks is important finally reaches her threshold. It takes her a good three months to get up the courage to file for the divorce. It starts with long drives, wanting to go to the courthouse and ending up detouring here and there and coming home empty handed.

The day she succeeds in filing for divorce, John’s being interviewed on the evening news. Helen locks the door and wedges his armchair up against it so he can’t get in. She’s almost disappointed the next morning when there’s no sign he even came home and tried and she decides she’s not going to sleep in her bed any longer. It doesn’t feel right, not without John there. Her paintings get moody and dark, landscapes that are grim and sinister, and she sells several of them to an eccentric art dealer in San Francisco. She opens a new account for that money, an account separate from John’s, and he never knows.

Months pass and Helen’s paintings lighten a little. She suspects it has more to do with her new medication regimen and less to do with actually being happy but the new tones are autumn-like and sell well to an interior decorator. Helen’s glad that her painting still supports her because it derails every argument John’s ever had about her chosen profession. He’s in the news more and more these days, aggressive and tough on crime. Helen’s glad he’s happy, at least, and she privately smiles at the fact that there’s not a new woman. She wants him to sign the divorce papers more than anything but she doesn’t want him moving on. Helen suspects she’s not going to move on.

The dreams start soon after, dark and twisted ones that star Will Zimmerman and leave her waking up on the couch in a cold sweat. She takes to listening to trance music and painting all hours of the night, trying to push herself so that when she sleeps, she’s too exhausted to dream. She thinks it works for a little while but the dreams always come back, she’s in a tank and she’s being held down and she’s _scared_ , she’s so scared. Dr. Zimmerman’s there too and she doesn’t know why he keeps showing up, why he’s always watching her through his wide windows when he’s supposed to be happy with his pregnant wife.

When Abby Zimmerman comes over with a basket and a big smile on her face, Helen groans. She doesn’t want to engage in pleasantries when she’s been up half the night scared to death she’s going to fall asleep and when Abby makes a joke about her being Scottish it’s all she can do to keep from rolling her eyes. She wants to say something mean to make the woman just _go_ and she wonders how it’d come across if she told her that her darling, devoted husband spends much of his time watching Helen through the upstairs window. She doesn’t imagine Abby will take it very well and Helen bites her tongue.

She tosses the biscuits in the bin and paints furiously, infinity symbols slashing across the soft pastels of her landscapes in bold blue strokes. Over and over as if it means something and when Helen can’t divine a damned thing from her paintings she tosses them all out back and mentally makes a note to carry them out on Thursday so the garbage collectors can take them away. She calls her agent and has a row with him about how she’s not a machine meant to churn out paintings and tosses the phone down angrily. She won’t be producing any more work this month and the buyers will just have to live with it. Perhaps it will drive the demand up.

Zimmerman steals her paintings when he thinks she doesn’t notice and Helen doesn’t care. He’s entitled to her rubbish if he honestly wants it.

***

When John comes to see her and she tells him that love’s not enough anymore, it’s all she can do to keep from crying. She grips the kitchen counter until her knuckles go white and after he’s left, she digs her nails into her palm until she draws blood. Dr. Zimmerman comes over and talks about the dreams they’ve been having, about the fact that he remembers nothing about wooing and marrying his wife. He calls her Magnus, a name she hasn’t heard in years, and it’s like a bell’s rung. She hates John. Will’s her partner.

It’s not that simple though, not really. What’s being happy, in the end? Certainly it can make the years go by more quickly but when you’re happy, you just have more to lose. Anything that’s ever made Helen happy ends up turning pear-shaped in the end and maybe it’s a depressing outlook, but she’s entitled to it. She brews them both tea and they work out a plan to see which is the real world and which is false. It’s ludicrous, even for a creative mind like her own, but Will (it’s Will now, so easily) seems to want to go along with it wholeheartedly.

It’s hard to pack up the car and get inside, slam down the locks and watch his wife and her husband screaming at them to come back. _They’re holding us in this reality_ , she thinks, and she wonders what she’ll have to do to break out. They can’t kill themselves…what if that kills them in the real world? Helen has no idea how to break out of a dream and it all seems like some poorly edited film, in the end. Will jokes about driving the car over a cliff and while Helen’s always been prone to melancholy, she’s never actually wanted to end it.

***

In the end, they end up driving and driving and they don’t stop until they’re well into Oregon. Helen hardly remembers the border check and she assumes that they’d flashed their passports based on the fact that nobody’s been tailing them. She rouses a sleeping Will from the passenger’s seat and tosses him a hotel key. It’s a small hotel in a small town and the room only has one bed but Helen’s so tired she hardly cares about that. She just knows they need to _escape_ so they can come up with a plan to leave this reality for good and get back to who they’re supposed to be.

She doesn’t know when she fell asleep but when she wakes in the middle of the night, her shoes have been tugged off and lined up next to the bed and the blankets are tucked all around her. All she can hear is the quiet whir of the air conditioning and the steady tap-tap-tap of Will’s fingers against the touchpad of his phone. She shifts to sit up and tugs the blankets up around her shoulders and the movement’s enough to catch his attention. When he looks at her, he smiles, but it’s tense around his eyes.

“Go back to sleep, Helen. I’m just liquidating my bank accounts.” Helen wonders if it’s in poor taste to mention that his pregnant wife probably needs to be taken care of, especially considering she’s not healthy, but should she be worried about imaginary people she didn’t care for in the first place? She doesn’t know. She pads over to the hotel desk with the blanket still around her shoulders and ruffles his hair lightly.

“Come with me?”

When Will slides into bed with her and buries his face against her neck and shoulder, Helen expects the evening to take a different path than it started out on. Her skin feels wet where his face is pressed against her and she feels tears pricking at her own eyes, sobs wracking her shoulders. She’s silent when she cries, she’s gotten good at that, but Will’s tears are messy and his sobs are loud. He curls around her so tightly as if he’s afraid he’ll wake up and she won’t be real either and Helen has to admit she has the same fear.

She doesn’t even like him very much but the dichotomy of her memories in this reality and the memories from the other reality, the proper reality, has her all mixed up. More than anything, she wants to feel alive and feel good again and she hasn’t felt that way since long ago, since back when things were good with her and John.

When Will’s hands start tugging at her clothes, the moonlight drifting through the curtains catches his wedding ring and makes it glint. She closes her eyes and tries not to think about that and concentrates instead on the tease of his lips and tongue, of his hands warm over her curves and his cock buried in her until she hardly knows her own name. He calls her Magnus when he comes, reverent, like she’s something special and something worthy of worship. Helen’s never been worthy of that kind of awe and she wonders if this is what it’s like in the real world, in her own reality.

He makes love to her again in the half-dark, covering her and whispering her name in a rain of soft kisses and muttered promises. She knows he’s still thinking about his wife even when he’s buried deep in her but she pushes it to the back of her mind as she grips his hips because really, she can’t blame him. The love was gone between she and John and Will’s a beautiful stranger on a journey with her. He’s comfort now, a balm to her soul, and she needs him.

When she comes, it’s Will’s name she cries out. That’s all that matters, in the end.

***

When she wakes, it’s to bright lights and water rushing around her. She’s scared and frantic again, panic closing up her throat, and when she’s tugged out of the water and given a towel to dry off, Helen’s surprised to see Henry and Kate dashing around the corner. She’d thought the Cabal, honestly, or Hollow Earth and she never expected her own team to have done this. There’s a hasty explanation about some sort of Abnormal and Helen watches it as it moves in the tank. It’s not something she’s ever seen before and she worries that Hollow Earth is more of a liability than a help.

She doesn’t get a chance to talk to Will privately until they’re back in Old City and she manages to corner him in the library when everyone else is asleep. He looks halfway to sleep himself, eyes red-rimmed and puffy, and his phone pulses constantly with vibrations. Text notifications, Helen imagines, since it would be ludicrous to set his email to alert. He must know she’s asking because he gives her a sheepish look.

“Abby. I broke up with her.” Helen frowns a little. He didn’t do it via text message, did he? How gauche. He clears his throat and stretches before answering and Helen finds that she’s more than a little distracted by the hollow of his throat. It was just last night that she’d had her teeth there, had soothed it with her tongue. Helen knows it was a dream and yet, she almost wishes it was real now that she has her memories of Will back.

“Being a part of the Sanctuary means being lonely, from time to time,” Helen says sympathetically, rubbing the back of his neck and his back the way she had occasionally in Carentan when he’d gotten stressed and frustrated with their lot in life. He turns his head to look up at her, brows drawing together quizzically, and Helen can tell he’s forming a million questions about what happened in the dream and she’s simply not prepared to address them. She brushes her fingers against his lips.

“One step at a time, Will. We have a world to save.”

He tugs her down and answers her with a kiss and even though Helen feels like she’s slept with him, has learned every inch of his skin and had him consume her inside and out, it still feels like the first time she’s ever been with him. They need to assess the worldwide situation, it’s true, but for now she just wants to ground herself in this reality with a touchstone from the last.


End file.
